My parents (and I'm sure many others) pushed for resume blasts until the last couple of years. It makes sense from the perspective of the world they grew up in. You sent as many as you could and got a lot of job opportunities to choose from.

I sent out 15 highly targeted applications and got a 100% response rate. All of them were polite, mostly manually written rejections. I got one interview that went nowhere. That's when I decided I'd be better off starting my own business.